That was the biggest question of all, in some ways. Kira had lived with Nandita for nearly twelve years. If she’d known what Kira really was—if she’d known the whole time and never said a word—Kira didn’t like that at all.

The thoughts made her queasy, just as they had on the street outside. I’m fake, she thought. I’m an artificial construct that thinks she’s a person. I’m as fake as the faux-stone finish on this desk. She walked into the front office and touched the peeling reception desk: painted vinyl over pressed plastic board. Barely even natural, let alone real. She looked up, forcing herself to forget about the discomfort and focus on the task at hand. The reception area was spacious for Manhattan, a wide room filled with splitting leather couches and a rugged rock structure, probably a former waterfall or fountain. The wall behind the reception desk showed a massive metal ParaGen logo, the same one on the building in the photo. She opened her bag, pulled out the carefully folded picture, and compared the two images. Identical. She put the photo away and walked around to the back of the reception desk, picking carefully through the papers strewn across the top of it. Like the stairwell, this room had no external opening and had thus stayed closed off from the elements; the papers were old and yellowed, but they were intact and neatly ordered. Most of it was unimportant clutter: phone directories and company brochures and a paperback book the receptionist had been reading, I Love You to Death, with the image of a bloody dagger on the cover. Maybe not the most politically correct thing to be reading while the world ended, but then again the receptionist hadn’t even been here during the Break. She would have been evacuated when RM got really bad, or when it was first released, or maybe even as early as the start of the Partial War. Kira tapped the book with her finger, noting the bookmark about three quarters through. She never found out who was loving whom to death.

Kira glanced again at the directory, noting that some of the four-number phone extensions started with 1, and some with 2. The office took up two floors of the building, maybe? She flipped through the pages and found in the back a section of longer numbers, ten digits each: several starting with 1303 and others with 1312. She knew from talking to adults, people who remembered the old world, that these were area codes for different parts of the country, but she had no idea which parts, and the directory didn’t say.